


No Words

by thedevilchicken



Category: Dredd (2012)
Genre: Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Drugged Sex, F/M, Telepathy, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:46:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24578515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: An undercover job that Anderson is working goes awry when the bad guys find Dredd snooping.
Relationships: Cassandra Anderson/Joseph Dredd
Comments: 8
Kudos: 81
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	No Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alamorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/gifts).



When the building came down, she was sure they were going to die. No ifs, no buts, no bargaining, no smart plans, nothing at all they could do to stop it or even slow it down, not even a hit of slo-mo to prolong the agony. It fell, and all they could do was pull themselves through the half-jammed doors into the elevator shaft; they were still climbing down when the structure collapsed above them and the shockwaves made them drop. It was two floors down onto concrete, in a shower of dust as the elevator came down, and the only good thing that came of it was that when the dust settled, the elevator had blocked the bulk of the debris. Given the best she could say was they hadn't been crushed to death, that didn't say anything great for the situation.

"Dredd?" she said. "You alive over there?"

He cracked a glow stick and it lit them both up in cold blue light. It made the blood oozing out of his arm from between his fingers look black instead of red and made what she could see of his face under the margin of his helmet look stark and white and colorless, but there wasn't enough blood for that to have been real. He was alive, though, with his helmet still on and his jaw clenched tight, so it didn't really matter that he didn't say a word. That was just the way Dredd was, even if maybe his jaw looked tighter than usual. 

Of course, they hadn't really spoken since a couple of weeks after Peach Trees and Ma Ma and slo-mo, and Dredd giving her the pass she still wasn't sure she'd deserved. They hadn't really spoken since a couple of weeks after Peach Trees, sixteen days after if she was going to get exact about it, and that meant they hadn't really spoken in eight months. 

"Could you at least tell me if you're bleeding to death or if that wound's superficial?" she said, and jerked her chin in the direction of his bloody arm. It was bleeding from somewhere above his elbow but she couldn't tell where, or how deep, or what the hell he'd caught himself on on the way down the shaft that had somehow sliced straight through the standard reinforcements of his suit. 

"Superficial," Dredd replied. He took his hand away. He flexed his arm and grunted, then clamped his hand back over it again. 

"Broken?" she asked. 

"Broken," he replied, following her lead for what she guessed was not the first time and not getting technical about it. _Broken_ would do. It got the point across: even if there'd been a way for them to climb out of there, Dredd wouldn't be doing any climbing. And maybe she could've climbed - she was pretty sure the worst she'd gotten in terms of injuries was a couple of slightly bruised ribs that smarted when she breathed in - but when she pulled herself up to her feet and peered around the fallen elevator into what was left of the shaft above, it was pretty obvious they weren't getting out that way. The shaft was blocked, not just by the elevator but also a thick support column that had come down over the top of it, though she was pretty sure that support column was what currently stood between them and more-or-less certain death. 

"Someone'll come," she said as she settled back down on the ground. "They know we're here."

Dredd sighed. He rested his head against the wall with a clunk of helmet against concrete and she resisted the urge to tell him that might be what finally brought what remained of the building down. "Sure," he said. And as the bulk of the heap above them groaned and creaked, what he didn't say was, _Before or after we're squashed like bugs?_

He didn't need to say it, though, because she heard it loud and clear. 

They hadn't spoken in eight months. Except that didn't mean they hadn't seen each other; the fact was, they had. And it sure as hell didn't mean she hadn't heard him. 

\---

She'd been undercover when they'd met again after Peach Trees, some shitty waitressing gig in a crappy strip club where guys grabbed her ass twenty times a night and she had to rein in the urge to break their wrists, or introduce their overpriced champagne to their oversexed laps at the very least. 

It really was overpriced, too - the bartender, an overworked and perennially put-upon guy by the name of Adewale who'd found himself under the thumb of the Heavenly Havens mob before he'd gone to judges to get himself out of it, refilled top shelf bottles with bottom shelf contents every Tuesday morning when they closed for cleaning. Not that the place ever really looked clean. The floor was sticky with who knew what (Cassandra had tried really hard to keep that part out of her head) and the tops of all the plastic tables had obscenities gouged into them like some guys were more intent on defacing club property than watching the dancers. Some were furtive and scratched with their keys behind their free hand like no one could tell what they were doing and the bold ones, the mob ones like the slimy creep Marco Baresi, used their switchblades and laughed at each other's handiwork like scratching an oversized dick into a table was the height of wit. She wasn't sure they'd've known wit if it had slapped them around the back of the head with a stainless steel drinks tray, but she was paid to smile and _not_ cause bodily harm. Her job was observation and making believe she was a waitress while she did it. So she smiled, and she didn't dent her tray with his skull. Sometimes it was a close thing. 

She'd been in and out of perverts' heads for eight days when the guy whose head she was actually there to get inside finally made his long-awaited appearance: Alessandro Torregrossa, whose name had made Cassandra smile not only because he was the head guy in the Heavenly Havens mega-block - which was a literal big damn tower - but because he was north of six and a half feet tall and a big damn tower himself. He made everyone around him look small, from his tough guy bodyguards to his irritating dick of a cousin, Baresi. 

So, she took the drinks orders from him and his guys, smiled tightly when one of them grabbed her ass, and walked away while she tried not to get six guys' fantasies inside her head all at once. Except it turned out one of them was openly gay and making eyes at Adewale, who was absolutely into that. Made a nice change from horny guys trying unsuccessfully to get into the dancers' pants, she thought. 

She served the actual good stuff, not that she was sure any of them could've told the difference and she had to admit she really couldn't tell the difference herself. The ass-grabber, fucking Baresi, offered her a glass of it to sit on his lap and she declined politely, told him she had to work and maybe his cousin who owned the place would prefer his clients get their drinks, and when he tried to press the issue, Torregrossa slapped him straight across the face and told him she was right. She smiled at him, and he nodded at her. Then he went back to his shady business, and she went back to serving drinks while she was taking a stroll around his head. Everything they needed was in there; she just had to know where to look.

At some point over the next forty minutes, the ass-grabber went outside with his team of surly goons, all of them as obvious as it was possible for a mobster to be, like he'd chosen them for their innate ability to look conspicuous. At some point maybe twenty minutes after that, he came back in to the sound of accompanying gunfire. He shoved Dredd down over the table and got Dredd's heel straight to his groin for his trouble while the other patrons made their way out the door and the dancers beat a hasty retreat. Cassandra went still at the bar and set her tray of drinks back down. Torregrossa sighed. He shook his head. Cassandra watched, trying to assess the situation.

"This is your idea of a birthday gift?" Torregrossa asked. "Do you have any idea how much trouble this will cause me?"

"He was sniffing around outside!" the ass-grabber said. He picked himself up from the sticky floor pretty gingerly. "I know how much you hate judges, cous. I thought you'd be pleased I brought you one."

Torregrossa sighed again. He rubbed his face. "I'm not pleased, _cous_ ," he said. "What exactly was he gonna do, revoke our liquor license? Jesus Christ." He waved one hand toward the door. "Get out of my sight. Don't come back till you've found the god-given sense you were born with." 

"But cous..."

Torregrossa pulled his gun from its shoulder holster underneath his immaculately tailored jacket. He aimed it pretty squarely at his cousin's forehead. "Don't think I won't pull the trigger just 'cause you're my mom's sister's kid," he said. "She'd probably thank me. Get the hell out of here." So Baresi walked out, grumbling under his breath the whole time about how fucking unfair it was. And Torregrossa turned his attention to Dredd. His hands were tucked behind his back and there was a zip-tie wrapped around his wrists to keep them there. He'd slumped down onto his knees. 

"So, what kind of charges am I looking at?" Torregrossa asked, and Dredd being Dredd, he rattled off the long list of crimes and public order violations that he'd witnessed since his arrival at the property, including the recommended sentence for each of them. Torregrossa's guys whistled and jeered; the guy himself raised one hand and they quieted back down again. 

"What you're saying is there's no good reason for me to leave you alive," he said, and Dredd set his jaw. 

"Murder of a city judge," he said. "Penalty is death."

"Sure, if they know it's me." He glanced aside, to one of the other guys. "Any comms getting out of the block?" he asked, and Cassandra knew the answer to that: no signals had been leaving the Havens for two days straight so even if the Hall of Justice knew Dredd was in the block, they had no way of knowing _where_. They'd just have to hope someone who knew she was there came to ask her and found them both instead. 

"No, boss. We're good."

Torregrossa stood. He put his gun away, back into its holster. "Get my dumbass cousin back in here," he said. "Tell him this is his goddamn mess. He gets rid of the judge and he does it quick and clean or so help me, the judges won't need to fine him - I'll put a bullet in his head myself." 

Then he left. And a couple of minutes later, the dumbass ass-grabbing cousin came back in, looking pissed and agitated, like he really didn't like being told what to do. He _really_ didn't like it - he had a picture in his head of his cousin lying dead at his feet and all the Torregrossa businesses suddenly turning Baresi. Then he threw back his abandoned champagne in one quick gulp and the image in his head began to change. Dredd was in it. Baresi smiled. Cassandra's stomach sank.

"Let's have some fun," he said, and two or three of his six guys winced to themselves. One rubbed his neck. One took a deep breath. "What, you pussies don't like fun?" he said. He turned and looked at them. He waved his fancy gun around, more like a fashion accessory than a weapon, but Cassandra could see the safety was off. 

"Boss, it's just, Mr. Torregrossa said to get rid of the judge," one of them said. "He said to do it quick and clean. He--"

Baresi shot him in the shoulder and the guy went down on the ground and sure, Baresi played it like he'd meant it that way, but Cassandra knew he'd been aiming to hit the guy in the head. Baresi was a liability. She had no idea how to deal with him and get both Dredd and herself out of there alive, not with the narcissistic inferiority chaos bullshit floating around inside the guy's brain. 

"We're gonna have some fucking fun!" Baresi said, with a wave of his gun, and for a second she thought Dredd, on his knees with his wrists tied, was going to rush the guy and take his chances. Or maybe he had a plan except Cassandra could see three more guys by the door and she could hear more guys outside, and there was no chance, there was _no chance_ , that Alessandro Torregrossa hadn't got some kind of contingency plan in place for his incompetent cousin. The fact of his incompetence really couldn't be coming to him now as a surprise.

So, she told him _no_ straight into his head, loud as she could, like electric that made his fingers twitch behind his back, but otherwise he didn't give the game away. He didn't flinch. He didn't look around to try to find her, but he knew it was her. That much she could tell. 

_Anderson_ , he thought, or at least she thought he thought - she hated wearing her helmet because sometimes it interfered with the things she could do, and right at that moment his helmet was interfering, too. But Baresi wasn't wearing a helmet. Baresi was an open book, with a large number of pictures and not a whole lot of text. So, from the bar with Adewale, she put the thought into his head that maybe he should take the judge's helmet off. It was easy enough - he even wanted to do it, so he didn't fight the idea at all. He just looked really pleased with his own fantastic plan as he reached over to pull Dredd's helmet off. 

Dredd glared. Baresi laughed. He put the helmet upside down on the table and poured what was left of the bottle of pricey champagne inside it, then used it to pour the champagne over Dredd. It wet his hair and trickled down under his collar and ran over his leather suit where it would get sticky if it had a chance to dry, though Cassandra knew Baresi didn't mean to give Dredd much of a chance to feel it. But she didn't dare risk a stronger suggestion, like letting him go. She had a feeling he'd just shoot instead, a violent reaction against the thing he didn't want to do, and even with his crappy shot he couldn't have missed from that kind of distance. 

"So you're Dredd, huh?" Baresi said. He tapped the badge on Dredd's chest with the muzzle of his gun. Cassandra heard it; she could practically feel it. "You've caused my family some trouble over the years." He looked around at his guys. "Right? We should cause him some trouble. Hero judge, incorruptible, yeah? We tried. We really tried. Drugs, money, women...you just don't want any of it, do you? You think you're better than us." He put his gun down on the table and she could feel Dredd's eyes on it, she could feel him testing the zip-tie at his wrists and she knew he wouldn't make it; she told him _don't_ , and he didn't. 

"You never want anything we've got to offer," Baresi said, as he was patting down his own jacket. He fished out a vial of something and Cassandra grimaced; Dredd wasn't going to like this. Then Baresi pressed the dispenser into the soft skin underneath Dredd's jaw and she heard the faint hiss as it injected. "See if you can resist this," Baresi said, and he patted Dredd on the cheek, then he sat himself back down. He turned to his guys. "Go get a girl," he said. "See how long it takes for him to crack." And the guys looked between each other for a second, from Baresi their jackass boss to the guy still bleeding on the ground with a bullet in his shoulder and a wad of napkins pressed against it, and back again, like they weren't sure what to say. 

Cassandra cleared her throat and all eyes turned to her. "All the dancers left," she said. "It's protocol. Shooting starts and they get out." 

Baresi frowned. "Yeah? So why are you here?"

"I'm not a dancer," she said. "I'm a waitress. I serve drinks. Sometimes I serve peanuts. I don't dance. I'm a shitty dancer."

Baresi raised his gun. He pointed it roughly in her direction, except at that looks-cool tilted angle he was a whole lot more likely to hit Adewale or his cousin's business's expensive liquor and maybe start a whisky fire that would spread to the vents and take out half the block given their shitty fire suppression than shoot her. "Get over here," he said, and he gestured with the gun, which really wouldn't have helped his aim, but she raised her hands and did as she was told. "You've been teasing me for weeks," he said, which was a vast exaggeration considering she'd only worked there for the past eight days, though she supposed on a technically that was more than one week. He said it by her ear, and then he licked her neck, and it took a whole lot more strength than she'd known she had in her not to knee him in the groin and probably get shot for her trouble. He pushed her back and she staggered against the table and made the glasses on it clink together like a toast to Marco Baresi's really, really bad idea. 

"Take him," he told his guys, gesturing at Dredd. "Up on the stage. You too. And take your shirt off."

She knew exactly what he had in mind, and she did exactly what he said - she took her shirt off and stripped down to her bra as she followed the two guys dragging Dredd up onto the stage. The girls had turned the music off on their way out but the lights were still on from the last act, a set of slow-moving colored spotlights, pinks and blues and purples moving up and down the catwalk from the curtain to the pole. She hopped up to sit on the edge of the stage then turned and pulled herself up with her shirt still in her hand and Dredd was slouching there at the foot of the pole, on his knees, eyes closed, and she honestly couldn't tell if he was still just covered in champagne or if the drug Baresi had hit him with had already made him start to sweat. If it hadn't, it wouldn't be long. 

"Take it all off, sweetheart," Baresi said, and Cassandra had a feeling she was going to have to. It was fine, though, she told herself; the intoxicating, near-paralytic effect that the drug had on Dredd would last maybe twenty minutes tops and then he'd be himself again and at some point Baresi would let his guard down, and maybe then there'd be an exit before he managed to aim straight enough to kill them both, or Dredd at least. She could do whatever she had to do to get them both out of there alive, and she'd had to do a whole lot worse than strip in front of Dredd. Not that she believed for one second that that was all Baresi had in mind. 

She toed off her tennis shoes and nudged them toward the edge of the stage. She unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them down over her hips. And Dredd looked up at her as she reached back to unhook her bra; his face was flushed and his eyes were dark and she could see the way his cock was straining at the leather of his pants. She knew what the drug was - it had started out in some military research lab once upon a time as an interrogation aid, till a particularly enterprising employee had taken it to some gang or other as a kind of aphrodisiac. It wasn't for the faint-hearted - in guys, it somehow bound itself up with the act of ejaculation and if you didn't get there fast, well...you'd kind of wind up dead. Cassandra guessed it figured that Baresi had some on him, vain asshole that he was: most guys she knew could admit there was a chance they wouldn't get it up in the first damn place, drug or no drug, never mind a cast-iron, bet-your-life certainty that they'd come within an hour. 

Dredd looked up at her from his knees as she took off her bra and dropped it onto the underlit stage. It was shining a muted blue-purple that made Dredd seem not quite real and she thought maybe that would help, just a little, if she could pretend this part was all a weird dream. Except then she took off her panties and Baresi jeered behind her, ever the asshole, and Dredd bared his teeth and took a hissing breath between them. 

_Anderson_ , he was thinking, loud and clear. _I hope you have a plan_.

 _Not much of one_ , she thought in reply. _And you probably won't like it_.

 _Will I like it more or less than getting shot?_

She made a face that only he could see. _Jury's out on that_ , she replied. Then she stepped around behind him and eased him down face-first against the stage. 

"Does anyone have a knife?" she asked, as they all stared at her, standing there naked. She mimed a knife and fork in the air there in front of her, chest height since none of them were looking at her face. "You know. You cut with it. His wrists are tied. I know he's weak as a kitten right now but do you expect me to do all the work?"

Baresi pulled his switchblade from his pants pocket and he threw it to her, not a care in the world; she caught it, and she opened it, and there were flecks of the club's plastic tables on the blade. He'd probably been gouging dicks into the tabletops for months, the vandalizing jackass. She leaned down - Baresi jeered as her breasts swayed forward though his guys remained suspiciously silent - and she cut the tie at Dredd's wrists. She set the knife aside and didn't slip the blade away. Then she knelt and helped Dredd turn over onto his back. 

"Get his dick out," Baresi told her. She looked at him and she must've done it sharply because he scowled at her and waved his gun like she'd slapped him in the face. "You heard me, sweetheart. Get it out. Don't make me wait."

She fumbled at Dredd's waist for the place she knew his jacket snapped together with his pants and released the two front catches. She undid his belt and unfastened his pants and he groaned as her knuckles grazed his cock against the leather. Baresi laughed and Cassandra frowned and Dredd curled his gloved hands into fists as they lay against the blue-purple stage. Then she slipped one hand inside and drew him out, for everyone to see. She knew he was going to hate that, at least when he could think straight, but he was too far gone from the drug to think more than her name. 

Baresi whistled. "Seems a real shame for God to waste a dick like that on some sexless robot judge," he said, and for a second she felt like asking him if he was jealous but she knew precisely how well that wouldn't end - Dredd didn't need to expire from massive blood loss with his disembodied penis soaking in a champagne flute and she really wouldn't've put it past Baresi to think that constituted _quick_ and _clean_ , no matter what his cousin might say later. So she knelt there next to him, sitting on her knees on the glowing stage, hoping like hell that the blue-pink-purple light underneath her wouldn't show them all how wet she was. She understood - it was just a physiological response to the situation, it didn't really mean anything at all, except it felt like it did when the voice in Dredd's head that was also inside hers was chanting her name over and over like she was the only thing left alive on Earth. 

"What now?" she asked, and Baresi tapped his mouth with the muzzle of his gun like a complete ass. Somehow fate didn't intervene to set it off in his face, but she guessed that really would've been too easy. 

"Kiss it," Baresi said, and he waved his gun at Dredd's erection. So she did that; she leaned down and she swept her hair back over one shoulder out of the way. She licked her lips and she pressed them to the shiny tip of Dredd's too-hard cock. He grunted. Baresi laughed. She sat back up and raised her brows. 

"Lick it," he said, so she did that too. She licked the moisture from the tip with the flat of her tongue and he pressed his palms to the stage, pushing there so hard he trembled with it. She sat back up. She looked at Baresi. The bastard had one hand on his gun and the other on his _gun_ , his palm pressed over the tented crotch of his pants. If he'd been half the mobster his cousin was, he'd have killed Dredd already and he wouldn't've been getting off on making a waitress play sex games at gunpoint.

"How does he taste?" he asked. "Does he taste good?"

"Why don't you come up here and find out for yourself?" she asked, before she could stop herself; Adewale groaned and Baresi tapped the barrel of his gun against his temple, then he aimed it roughly at her. 

"Careful, sweetheart," he said. "My cousin only wants one of you dead, but don't think that'll stop me burying you with him. Understand?" She nodded. He nodded back. "Good. Now give him a nice long suck. Get right down there. Get it in your throat."

So she did. She wrapped one hand around him and she leaned right down with her ass up in the air. She took him in till she gagged and then further, till her eyes watered, till Dredd's big cock was in her throat just like Baresi wanted. And Dredd was still thinking her name, in a tight-desperate tone even in his head. All she could hear was _Anderson, Anderson_ , and she swallowed and he moaned and then she could hear Baresi laughing. 

"Not so goddamn pious now, huh," he said, as Cassandra pulled back, Dredd's cock all shiny in the spotlights. She looked at Baresi, her face hot, and he waved at Dredd's cock again. "Fuck him," he told her. "Climb on there and ride him, sweetheart. You can manage that, right? Just pretend he's me."

She didn't tell him the thought of fucking Marco Baresi was more likely to aid physical sickness than sex, which might not have gone down well. She just took a deep breath of crappy strip club air then straddled Dredd's hips. He looked at her and in his head she could see herself projected back, how she looked to him in his aphrodisiac haze, her blond hair shot through with blue and pink and the lips of her wet cunt shining purple. She could feel what he felt, too - the unnatural arousal, how desperate it was, how it seized him, clawed him, made his stomach drop and his heart race. He was dizzy and sick, the whole room turning around him like his aching cock resting against the close-cropped hair between her thighs was the very center of the fucking universe. She could feel how much he wanted to be in her, too, and fuck, oh fuck, that wasn't just the drug, and she knew that, she _knew_ it. At least part of that was him, with all the layers of rules and protocols and standard-issue Justice Hall repression stripped away by chemicals to show it to her. Dredd wanted to fuck her. At least the man buried deep under the judge did, and she honestly wasn't sure if that made the whole thing easier or harder. 

She took him in her hand. She sat up tall and eased him back and he was watching her, his gaze flitting restlessly between her face and her cunt, as she rubbed the tip of him against her clit then found her hole. She eased down. She was wet, and that was good because it made it easier to take him, thick as he was, big as he was, the biggest she'd had though she really hadn't had many. One guy before the academy and two while in it, the types who thought they could handle what she could do because they could guess a shape on a card one time out of twenty and they called that _psychic_. Maybe the only one who knew what she was and what she could do and hadn't balked at it was Dredd. 

She pushed him into her. She settled down and took him in and he groaned, his hands twitched up but he could barely move and so she moved instead, curling her toes under as she spread her hands on his chest and rode him. Baresi went quiet; she didn't need to turn her head and look to see he'd shoved one hand down the front of his pants and then he put his gun down, knocked two glasses off the table and all his guys turned to look, and that was it - that was the opening she was looking for. She picked up the knife and she threw it; her aim with a knife was a whole lot better than Baresi's was with a gun, as it turned out, and it hit him squarely in the throat. In the panic, she rolled, struck the nearest guy in the head with the heel of her foot and took his gun from him. Five shots followed and she hopped down from the stage, really missing her judge-issue boots with her bare feet, and she picked up Dredd's lawgiver by the barrel. She tossed it to him, let it clatter on the stage because he could barely move to pick it up but as the rest of the guys came in, he had it in his hand. They put them down. She scooped up her clothes. Then she helped Dredd down from the stage and with his cock still hanging out and her stark naked, they disappeared backstage and down the dancers' hidden emergency exit. 

She had a safehouse nearby, and once he was tucked back in and could walk upright and she was back in her shitty work clothes instead of her uniform, that was where they went. She took her clothes off again once they got inside, and he stripped himself out of his leathers - she was right, the champagne had made them sticky. Then he fucked her there against the wall, when she told him to inside his head, so he wouldn't die. 

They didn't talk when he was done. They didn't talk as she got herself off, too, with her legs around his waist and her back pressed to the wall and his cock softening inside her, her fingers on her clit and his mouth pressed to her throat. When he pulled back, and he pulled out, and they stood there together, he didn't say a word but she guessed he didn't have to. Then she put on her suit, the one she'd had stored in a maglocked trunk under the closet floor, and they walked into Alessandro Torregrossa's offices side by side. Dredd pronounced judgement; Cassandra carried it out. 

Then there'd been silence. Eight months of it, except not really. There'd been eight months of seeing each other across corridors in the Hall of Justice, at briefings, on calls. And every time she'd looked at him, she'd heard him loud and clear. Somehow now the helmet didn't make a difference. Distance didn't. Nothing did. She couldn't even tell if he was trying not to let her in; she'd heard it all anyway. They'd arrived on calls together, wordlessly, guns in hands, quick and sharp and competent, and she'd heard the way that he admired the way she worked. They'd sat side by side in meetings that always seemed to make her nervous and she'd heard him think about slipping his gloved hand onto her clothed thigh and squeezing, like that might reassure her. They'd stood together in the elevator and she'd heard him think about going down while they were going up, about his mouth between her legs and her heels against his back. She'd heard him think about his cock in her while he lay awake in bed at night, about seeing the place he entered her, how her cunt left him wet as she rode him. And she'd heard it every time he'd blamed himself, chastised himself, told himself _no_ , and that it was all his fault. Baresi had been wrong: Dredd had been tempted. But what had tempted him was her.

Every time he'd thought about her for the past eight months, she'd heard him. He'd thought about her often. And, unlike every other guy who thought those things about her, she really couldn't say she hadn't thought about him, too.

\---

She knelt at his side and she splinted his arm. She was pretty sure he'd be fine, if the elevator shaft didn't spew two hundred tons of debris down on top of them, which wasn't totally certain, and they sat together in the light of the single glow stick. The blue light reminded her of the club, and that wasn't exactly great. It reminded him of it, too; she didn't need to be psychic to know that, though being psychic helped. 

"You know, it wasn't your fault," she told him. "Okay, Baresi was an ass, but Torregrossa's men were really good at what they did. Why do you think I was undercover in the first place?" 

He made a noncommittal sound. She sighed. She closed her eyes. "Fine," she said. "Don't talk to me, but I don't know what you think that changes. I can still hear everything you think." 

And in his head he thought, _I can hear you, too_. Her heart jumped. That was new.

It only took three hours for rescue to come, some kind of access panel that led to a vent that came out above the elevator that they couldn't get to without a cutting torch but then there they were, outside, out of the dust. And when she got home, back to her shitty apartment, she could hear him in her head again. He was having his arm fixed. She'd been right; he was fine. It was only minor treatment.

That night, he knocked on the door. She shook her head and she called, "Don't tell me you don't know the code, Dredd. I really won't believe you." 

He came in. He took off his helmet and set it on the counter, no need to pretend she didn't know his face without it. He clenched his jaw; all she could think was how she wanted to press her mouth to the place where she could see the muscle strain. He pressed two fingers there, just because she thought it.

"Anderson," he said, out loud, and when he looked at her he didn't have to say another word. 

The rest was in her head already.


End file.
